Welcome to VOICE,

the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English!

In the early 21st century, English in the world finds itself in an “unstable
equilibrium”: On the one hand, the majority of the world's English users are not
native speakers of the language, but use it as an additional language, as a convenient means
for communicative interactions that cannot be conducted in their mother tongues. On the
other hand, linguistic descriptions have as yet predominantly been focusing on English as it
is spoken and written by its native speakers.

VOICE seeks to redress the balance by providing a sizeable, computer-readable
corpus of English as it is spoken by this non-native speaking majority of users in different
contexts. These speakers use English successfully on a daily basis all over the world, in
their personal, professional or academic lives. We therefore see them primarily not as
language learners but as language users in their own right. It is therefore clearly worth
finding out just how they use the language. This is exactly what VOICE seeks to make
possible.